Hey folks! I’m afraid I don’t have anything terribly exciting to report today as I’ve continued chipping away at the same task I have been for the past week, which is making more cool stuff to find underground.

I must confess, it’s been a bit tricky working on underground content of this nature. These things can’t be terribly big and it’s not really possible to know what kind of terrain to expect around a given piece without manually painting it yourself, and doing so can cause a couple of distinct problems.

First, it can drastically decrease the ability for any given microdungeon to appear, as it tends to result in increasingly larger pieces. The smaller a microdungeon is, the higher its success rate of it spawning. The other problem is chiefly that manually carving out the surrounding terrain to form the kind of shapes you want can be really time-consuming, and that clashes with the objective of pumping the underground full of as many of these things as possible. As a result, I tend to keep the shaping of terrain around these things fairly minimal.

For now, I’ll be continuing to work as I have until I’m needed on the progression stuff again. Allow me to leave you with a sample of one of the many Avian microdungeons I designed today.

Most microdungeons won’t be as easy to spot as this one. ;)
Until next time guys!

A lot of work has gone in to the gate system today. We’ve been designing exactly how it should look and producing mockups. Most of the art here is George’s but I wanted to show you what we had so far.

It’ll likely change a bit by the time it’s finished.

Click for full sized gif!

As you’ve heard from metadept and omni, I’ve been working on a *complete* rewrite of the tile rendering engine.  The old code was a nightmare of huge repeated hard coded blocks of logic, had long standing bugs, was *dog* slow, and was actually 3 systems running in parallel (one for regular materials, one for platforms, and one for neighbor based tiles like pipes).  I’m nearly finished now with a brand new system, replacing the old complicated set of systems with one simple(r) rule based system that is about a 10th the size in terms of lines of code.

Even though the new renderer is running the new tile neighbor rules system for every single tile every single frame, the fullscreen cpu usage of starbound has actually gone *down* by about 30%*.  The next step is to add caching of chunks into the system so that the geometry for each chunk is re-used for future frames if the chunk has not changed (the system was designed from the start with this in mind).  This should further reduce the cpu usage *dramatically*.

This isn’t committed quite yet, as there are some small missing graphical features which would freak the artists out like not color shifting the materials properly and messed up preview tiles.  Once those small issues are fixed, and caching is added, it can be committed to master.  I’m hoping I can finish this up by early tomorrow, and I should have some better performance numbers then.

(*) The 30% figure is partially due to the new tile rendering system and partially due to some other related changes which also improve perf, it’s hard to tease out which is which.